Manufacturing Truth
CJ Hopkins
If you’re one of the millions of human beings who, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, still believe there is such a thing as “the truth,” you might not want to read this essay. Seriously, it can be extremely upsetting when you discover that there is no “truth” … or rather, that what we’re all conditioned to regard as “truth” from the time we are children is just the product of a technology of power, and not an empirical state of being. Humans, upon first encountering this fact, have been known to freak completely out and start jabbering about the “Word of God,” or “the immutable laws of quantum physics,” and run around burning other people at the stake or locking them up and injecting them with Thorazine. I don’t want to be responsible for anything like that, so consider this your trigger warning.
OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at how “truth” is manufactured. It’s actually not that complicated. See, the “truth” is … well, it’s a story, essentially. It’s whatever story we are telling ourselves at any given point in history (“we” being the majority of people, those conforming to the rules of whatever system wields enough power to dictate the story it wants everyone to be telling themselves). Everyone understands this intuitively, but the majority of people pretend they don’t in order to be able to get by in the system, which punishes anyone who does not conform to its rules, or who contradicts its story. So, basically, to manufacture the truth, all you really need is (a) a story, and (b) enough power to coerce a majority of people in your society to pretend to believe it.
I’ll return to this point a little later. First, let’s look at a concrete example of our system manufacturing “truth.” I’m going to use The Guardian‘s most recent blatantly fabricated article (“Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy”) as an example, but I could just as well have chosen any of a host of other fabricated stories disseminated by “respectable” outlets over the course of the last two years.
The “Russian Propaganda Peddlers” story. The “Russia Might Have Poisoned Hillary Clinton” story. The “Russians Hacked the Vermont Power Grid” story. The “Golden Showers Russian Pee-Tape” story. The “Novichok Assassins” story. The “Bana Alabed Speaks Out” story. The “Trump’s Secret Russian Server” story. The “Labour Anti-Semitism Crisis” story. The “Russians Orchestrated Brexit” story. The “Russia is Going to Hack the Midterms” story. The “Twitter Bots” story. And the list goes on.
I’m not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook, Craig Murray, Glenn Greenwald, Moon of Alabama, and many others). [ed. including us]
The short version is, The Guardian‘s Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed “Russians”) on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding’s earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on … well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous “intelligence sources.” After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece (employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it.
By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other “respectable,” “authoritative” outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian‘s story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump … well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and “leftists” who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange.
At this point, I imagine you’re probably wondering what this has to do with manufacturing “truth.” Because, clearly, this Guardian story was a lie … a lie The Guardian got caught telling. I wish the “truth” thing was as simple as that (i.e., exposing and debunking the ruling classes’ lies). Unfortunately, it isn’t. Here is why.
Much as most people would like there to be one (and behave and speak as if there were one), there is no Transcendental Arbiter of Truth. The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that that “truth” is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.
Nor are there many truths (i.e., your truth and my truth). There is only one truth … the official truth. The truth according to those in power. This is the whole purpose of the concept of truth. It is the reason the concept of “truth” was invented (i.e., to render any other “truths” lies). It is how those in power control reality and impose their ideology on the masses (or their employees, or their students, or their children). Yes, I know, we very badly want there to be some “objective truth” (i.e., what actually happened, when whatever happened, JFK, 9-11, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Schrödinger’s dead cat, the Big Bang, or whatever). There isn’t. The truth is just a story … a story that is never our story.
The truth is a story that power gets to tell, and that the powerless do not get to tell, unless they tell the story of those in power, which is always someone else’s story. The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. They either parrot the truth of the ruling classes or they utter heresies of one type or another. Naturally, the powerless do not regard themselves as heretics. They do not regard their “truth” as heresy. They regard their “truth” as the truth, which is heresy. The truth of the powerless is always heresy.
For example, while it may be personally comforting for some of us to tell ourselves that we know the truth about certain subjects (e.g., Russiagate, 9-11, et cetera), and to share our knowledge with others who agree with us, and even to expose the lies of the corporate media on Twitter, Facebook, and our blogs, or in some leftist webzine (or “fearless adversarial” outlet bankrolled by a beneficent oligarch), the ruling classes do not give a shit, because ours is merely the raving of heretics, and does not warrant a serious response.
Or … all right, they give a bit of a shit, enough to try to cover their asses when a journalist of the stature of Glenn Greenwald (who won a Pulitzer and is frequently on television) very carefully and very respectfully almost directly accuses them of lying. But they give enough of a shit to do this because Greenwald has the power to hurt them, not because of any regard for the truth. This is also why Greenwald has to be so careful and respectful when directly confronting The Guardian, or any other corporate media outlet, and state that their blatantly fabricated stories could, theoretically, turn out to be true. He can’t afford to cross the line and end up getting branded a heretic and consigned to Outer Mainstream Darkness, like Robert Fisk, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, Assange, and other such heretics.
Look, I’m not trying to argue that it isn’t important to expose the fabrications of the corporate media and the ruling classes. It is terribly important. It is mostly what I do (albeit usually in a more satirical fashion). At the same time, it is important to realize that “the truth” is not going to “rouse the masses from their slumber” and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly “wake up,” “see the truth” and start “the revolution.” People already know the truth … the official truth, which is the only truth there is. Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.
And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this story.
As for Julian Assange, I’m afraid he is done for. The ruling classes really have no choice but to go ahead and do him at this point. He hasn’t left them any other option. Much as they are loathe to create another martyr, they can’t have heretics of Assange’s notoriety running around punching holes in their “truth” and brazenly defying their authority. That kind of stuff unsettles the normals, and it sets a bad example for the rest of us heretics.
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Aside from the fact that positing the relativity of truth as a “fact” also makes it false, implying that it is religious zealots, rather than other sorts that are typically motivated by a ‘discovery’ that all truth is contrived, seems unfair to the point of bigotry. Those who cite the word of God generally dismiss that discovery as nonsense. Those inspired by it to commit atrocities actually tended to be social Darwinists, jabbering about the will to power and the greater good of the species, which happens to be best served by culling most of its members.
I put this up on my Academia site – I have around 50 up on MuralGate and related issues (freely available and waiting to be shared!): The Land of the Lie 1. Corbyn was never regarded as antisemitic prior to his election as Labour Leader in 2015, not even by his severest critics. This may easily be demonstrated by the fact that, in at least 500 tweets referring to “Jeremy Corbyn,” antisemitism is never mentioned. 2. This does not mean, however, that his critics were sanguine about the possibility of Corbyn gaining power. They weren’t – as we can see from contributions in 2015 of Lord Finkelstein, Anshel Pfeffer, and Marcus Dysch. 3. Writing from a pro-Israel perspective these men were worried about Corbyn’s stance on Palestinian rights, his willingness to talk to Hamas, and the possibility of BDS becoming mainstream, especially should violence flare up again in Gaza. 4.… Read more »
RE 11 – Isn’t being demonised or marked out by such an influential lobby a ‘for us or against us’ call to NOT be seen to associate or support Corbyn and thus isolate him in the circles of political influence as a marked man?
For such ‘public vilification’ can be directed to anyone’s person, social standing and career.
While those taking offence and crying ‘foul!’ may present themselves as being morally righteous – is this not simply an act of an ‘unchallengeable power’ ?
The same as can dehumanise and violate Palestinians with international impunity – because no one can do anything about it, for to speak out even in the most measured terms is to risk attracting penalty.
Hi
Whether Israel, or whether the pro-Israel groups, I think that an influential lobby was behind the attacks. And as I think you are saying, it’s “for us or against us” (friends versus enemies). Let me put it this way. What were the real anxieties of the UK Jewish community (or the “establishment”) at the time of Corbyn’s election. I don’t believe there was a whiff of antisemitism! I think that the fear was that Corbyn might put in question the legitimacy of Israel given its racist behaviour and its hardline appraoch to Hamas. This might lead to BDS becoming mainstream. And if violence was to flare up again as it had done a year back (in 2014) then Corbyn might well be the only voice denouncing such violence. He would be in his element, and enjoy support on the street. He represented a very real threat to such people. That… Read more »
If you want to hold that there is no such thing as “truth” all that’s left is to wander in a fog of subjective relativism, dominated by rampant Egoism. Like Humpty Dumpty “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” If a “truth” is just what the writer says it is, but is also what I personally say it is – where are we left in order to deal with reality.? Truth is used to refer to objective reality in opposition to a subjective fanciful imagery. If I, in actual, demonstrable fact, hit the writer on the head with a lump of iron, but say he… Read more »
Yes. Absurd to make truth in our own image and then pronounce it dead. But that IS how we deny or kill our own awareness of true to raise a mind unlike and apart. With truth ‘dead’, dead ideas can seem to live – and so truth must be kept dead for survival’s necessity. There is no war on reality in truth, but only war on our conscious capacity to recognize and accept truly. A self at war with itself is indeed setting and living out the question ‘who pays the sacrifice?’ by which the dominant ‘survives’. And so ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, will never put Humpty together again’ – because the impossible never happened. Truth did not ‘fall’ and shatter, but from the false flag of denied and projected culpability – our sense of self is shattered and lost to the threat of division… Read more »
Since that episode when the guardian had their hard drives smashed up by, if I recall correctly, the ‘intelligence’ agencies their reporting has followed a downhill trajectory becoming yet another outlet in the MSMfold, spewing the usual, accepted narrative. Am I wrong?
Of course – the excellent, liberal editor has been replaced.
Good stuff CJ Hopkins. Although I remain convinced there is an objective world and real objective conditions (the object of empirical science) the human or world we live in as individual humans is not objective in that sense; it is subjective; it is noospheric. Human knowing is inherently subjective and interpretational and the ruling elites get to determine the narrative and the consensus reality and truth of the human world. I was just watching some of the pomp & ceremony of the Bush funeral and it signified to me the real order of things as the elites honor a loyal operative who served their interests in some of the highest offices of Western power. The talk of a humble and saintly christian soul was impossible to reconcile with my own personal truth about the evil activities of George Bush and the millions of lives he was involved in killing or… Read more »
Whilst being a pleb and not articulate enough to air my stance, reading this article reminds me of Foucault’s discourse theories and the Regime of Truth.
Always a breath of fresh air to read off-guardian and its comment section. Bravo!
Taff
The truth exists independently of our opinion.
Whether we think our truth is the truth is a bit like Schroedinger opening the box.
Until you open the box you just don’t know.
When you do – you know.
The Guardian et al don’t want to open the box.
Truth then, is neither our thinking, nor any opinion given power or identified with emotional attachment. Truth simply is. And always already is. But the boxing of ‘is’ into image and concept, imagines and thinks and feels to ‘open’ a private version or kingdom of its own self differentiation, as a ‘personal and partial truth’ that is taken from wholeness in forms and patterns of association. Such ‘conditioning’ is then the mind of its perceiver, replacing or covering truth as if to have opposed, denied or killed it. The ‘new’ truth sees nothing as it is – but through a defended sense of a separate ‘whole’ in a world of separate wholes or others, who are ‘seen’ for what can be gotten from them, or as threat or rival that would take this fragile but heavily defended ‘truth’ from you. And so the world of struggle in shifting illusions of… Read more »
@ Ken Kenn,
And here is WHY no one want s to open the box.
‘Hasbara Provocateurs, Shills and Trolls.’
I concur with CJ: there is only one story, though it has a plurality of meanings …approximately 7.3 billion meanings: each designated a ‘self’, ‘person’ or ‘being’ (atma-drsti, pudgala, svabhava). Only this story is not dictated by ‘Them’ to ‘Us’ – ‘They’ are ‘Us’. The differentiation is an Otherisation (dualistic linguistic differentiation: the major structural byline of the story). The processual personification (skandha-uppadana) creates a ‘self-view’ (atma-drsti): and co-creates the Other. The Other is the realm of sensate form (rupa-skandha). Rupa is neither fully material or immaterial (in a Western sense), but form that can be sensed (Otherised, objectified and reified: another structural byline, or Leitmotif of the story). Self and world (rupa) specify each other. Self and world are co-dependant, co-evolved, and co-mutually arising (pratityasamutpada). Bio-cognitively: self and world are “structurally coupled” [Varela; Maturana: Santiago Theory]. The five senses; their internal and external sense bases (dhatu, ayatana, Indraya); and… Read more »
Nice conclusion. Thanks.
Does that mean, if we elevate our mind above the toxic rhetoric, ‘they’ become meaningless and irrelevant?!
When you recognize the meaningless as meaningless, you are already free of it. While looking for meaning in it, or taking meaning from opposing it, it serves purpose for you. In this sense you are the employer of the purpose and meanings you accept. This is your freedom, along with the freedom to recognize and release what no longer serves who you accept yourself to be. While simple, this does not assign fixed ‘meanings’ to the world or to others and then suffer them as real. What you choose to see is of course what you are looking for. In toxic self-judgement of a inner hatred, do many seek outside themselves for completion of love by possession or power by domination or peace by denial, so as to abate or escape a ‘wrongness’ of self, and so WANT to see what is wrong with everyone who does not fit or… Read more »
Thoughtful and sensible post. Thanks binra.
Indeed, well fitting description of today’s sociery: : “toxic emotional states are normalised in human society”
* today’s society
Stop calling the Guardianista ‘lefties’! They are nothing of the sort.
The Graun, New Statesman, et al have been brought under the establishment umbrella.
I’m a leftie, Corbynista- An admirer of Assange, Pilger, etc. And want May to have to personally pay the 15mill quid its cost to police the embassy.
As near as I can determine, you are the Leftie and they are the Liberals.
Fortunately your brief comment is so brief as to contain only a brief fragment of ad hominem opinion, and , nothing else.
well, liberal used to mean something very different. Now it means soft right wing.
No that’s pretty much what it has always amounted to. The petit bourgeoise.
Was the Liberal movement not the idea of shifting or expanding Sovereignty from the Aristocracy to the People? At the time of such cruelty and indifference to the people from the then ruling classes? Is the history of human kind to be overlaid by smug and cynical opinion? Political ideas tend to rise in reaction and then mutate or change when the context of their rising is no longer active. That’s why an opposition never gets into power – because of course they are no longer in opposition but defending from it. What does liberal mean now? Anything and nothing it would seem. In its name or rather as neo liberal ideas is the extending of false rights, and nurture and support fof a false sense of entitlement that draws the unwary into being used by state-backed power and drawn into dependence of a captive identity. Once power is attained,… Read more »
One of the easiest ways to tell truth from fiction is to think in terms of screenplays. Screenplays make boring reading because the text is of necessity simplified, its just part of the picture the director is weaving into the story. Since they’re simple they tend to present things in black and white, stylized stories that form one of a very few basic narratives. If you read a news story that fits into a similar narrative format then its almost certainly manufactured. Real history is more complex and less clear cut (although sometimes the truth can be stranger than anything a screenwriter could dream up). So taking that Assange story as an example, since it reads like a James Bond novel its likely to be at best a mixture of conjecture and exaggeration. You’ve got the generic Bad Guys — invariably “Russians” these days (although the Chinese can stand in… Read more »
So the Guardian manufactures truth? SO the Grauniad is little different from every other organ of news, be they mainstream or alternative. For although it isn’t an original idea by any means, it is very clear that every one of us manufactures our own personal version of truth and that we select the organs of news that most reflect the world that we would wish to believe in. In that sense there is no such thing as truth but only many subjective truths. There is little in our own worlds that can be seen to conform to reality in any objective manner. How could it be otherwise when Mephistopholes could say in Dr Faustus ‘why this is hell, nor am I out of it’, whilst a Buddhist might say that if we could only see it the phenomenal world is one of primordial purity. In many ways it is a… Read more »
Our personal, internally held truth has little impact on the world at large. When a discourse is started and enough people of ‘professional’ standing throw their weight behind it that discursive formation becomes a Regime of Truth. Ergo manufactured truth. And that can have a profound impact on the world.
You are here talking of narrative assertions or beliefs as truth? Of course you can fight over that as if that settles anything – other than shared belief that fighting settles anything. You only meet the world through who you accept yourself to be. You only experience the world that such self-definitions give you and that includes the responses you draw from others. I see that me mask over truth in all sorts of way and for different reasons that all have fear in common. Are we then afraid of fears that must be hidden? Or are we identified in such fears as our ‘person’ and defended or masked against a feared truth? Is truth made the Big Fear as the means by which a person can cope, manage, survive, find acceptance, or some sense of belonging in the collective social human world? The belief that you embody in telling… Read more »
‘Truth’, unlike news, information or even facts, is immutable.
Truth, like Love and Life, is here now.
Truth is born with us and dies with us. Everything else is ‘interesting’ or ‘educational’ but is not the Truth.
There is Truth and there is truth. All truth is manufactured. What matters is its impact on the individual, the collective, the world. Point being, nothing is true…
But you do not act from ‘nothing’ or believe ‘nothing’ so much as hide from what you accept by un-personing your true motivations. If nothing we THINK is true – then you have the basis to disregard thinking and let truth show you who you are – because the truth does not make you free so much as show you – you are free. Freedom may seem threatening to a sense of command and control – even if only a bubble reality, and so it may seem like a paralysis or death to the ‘mind of thinking’. So don’t think unless the thought flows with the movement of your true desire. True desire is felt in the heart when the mind of false desires is left unattended. Of course, no one – nor I can tell you what is true – because that is your right and power to give… Read more »
Assange isn’t ‘done for’ by any means. Extradition to the United States isn’t a mere formality at all. First, if the Americans want him extradited they will have to begin a legal process in the UK and the courts and judges are unlikely to submit to a request coming from Trump’s USA which most of them loathe. It’s going to be a long and complex legal battle. There’s also the question of the death penalty. In theory Assange risks execution for treason or espionage, but he’s not an American citizen, so this is problematic too. The UK courts are not going to simply hand him over to the Americans. It could take years. The Americans have to be careful not to make Assange look like a political prisoner as this would indicate that the entire case against Assange has been political from the very beginning and public opinion could easily… Read more »
We live in a post truth era. The truth is whatever the Deep State and powerful vested interests wish it to be and find convenient at any point in time. But there is nothing new in this. Think Tonkin Gulf, JFK, Operation Northwoods, USS Liberty, Operation Gladio, Red Brigades, Baader Meinhof, Iraq Incubator Babies, 9/11, Iraq WMD, Syrian Gas Hoaxes, David Kelly, Russiagate, Skripal, countless other lies and false flags peddled by the Fake News MSM, the list is endless. Or you can go further back to “Remember The Maine”, the Lusitania, Bayonetted-Belgian-Babies, Raped-Belgian-Nuns, and Human-Bodies-Turned-Into-Soap fairy stories. We have been lied to consistently over the generations. How much of the accepted historical record is actually true? You can’t take anything at face value. What about the Holocaust? Is that just a fabrication from beginning to end? Why should we believe that? They have lied to us about everything else,… Read more »
Hang on Mark… we live… in truth!
Everything else is our own nightmare.
And is not where the true of being is found.
It may seem that you are the vicim of the lies of others but for reasons not apparent, it was your choice or acceptance that made them your reality.
Of course that choice was what you now see as ‘unconscious’ because its nature was to hide.
What is a lie but a ‘hiding’?
The relentless attempts to get Holocaust mentioned on every page, site, talk show, or game show is beginning to offset the innate morbid fascination it engenders. But Mark, no matter some of it comes from the mouths of inveterate liars, it is not something that can or should be doubted.
I’m just saying from their proven track record, anything is possible. You can’t take anything at face value any more. If they could do a 9/11, they could manufacture a similar hoax about anything. Believe nobody. Trust nobody. We are living in a world of lies, and this has been going on for decades. We can only guess how much they have got away with before the advent of alternative media.
I agree with that entirely. Trying to guess at the truth has gone from a parlour game to a very grim reality. Will this Jeff Epstein case unfold in the general direction of unmasking what is going on ? Or will the the 26 visits by Bill Clintons penis to Epstein’s tiny island of pedophilia get buried once again?
Truth is given. But in giving something ELSE, we received something else and reacted as if our truth is threatened with attack, division, loss and death, or in guilt as as if a lie has possessed or become us, for which we are damned. And so everything is mustered to defend against the ‘violator’, the terror or the evil ‘without’ and everything is purposed to keep hidden the feared lack of legitimacy that merits and expects rejection, and so rejects first, as a necessity of survival in the terms such a split mind dictates and serves. The above may not see to connect with a world of lies or of a world arising from lies. But looking in the frame of lies will never uncover or restore a true appreciation. The lie and the father of it, is a wish that truth be different than it is. This indeed may… Read more »
“To hate the hateful does not to love restore” … unless by by such self-honesty or stark exposure in feeling and thought are we then moved to no longer choose to join with, participate in or ‘share’ the hateful. For where hate is not, love must be recognisably present. This is the greater fear that calls on hate to ‘save it’. Who in the pains of a separation (or communication breakdown), has not called on hate to ‘distance’ from hurt and then looked for the hateful in the broken ‘love’ to support the separating? And who in extremity of pain – be it physical, emotional, mental or of course all three, has not sworn NEVER AGAIN! There are no ‘walls’ or partitions to mind but what we accept and live by. But because mind is a tool or instrument of conscious focus, it can always be revisited and refreshed in… Read more »
There is no-thing before or after the atemporal lived experience. The elementary binary discrimination – BEFORE/AFTER – is retrospectively applied. For the human observer: creation cannot precede the lived experience – no-thing can – except that binary discrimination causes it to be. All human knowledge, including self-knowledge (atmabodha; gnosis), is built from elementary binary differentiation and discrimination. manufactured (tempororalised) AFTER the fact of the lived experience. This is not BigB’s verbiage. Listen to a piece of music. Now think about listening to a piece of music. Or try to describe the music. The music is the extra-lingual experience. When we try to assimilate the ‘meaning’ or emotion of the music (described to the self-view (atma-drsti) by the self-view) …all sense or meaning of the music is lost. We incorporate a linguistic impression of the music into the like, dislike, and neutral (vedana) complexes of the self-view. The music is categorised… Read more »
Of COURSE BigB, there is no time but the presence – (or better the verb: ‘presencing’ or be-ing) – apart from the story or theme unfolding as a fragmented perception. A story in which you are demonstrably participating with me. The mind or focus within the temporal sense can only perceive what happenED and is unaware of what IS (happening) except as the narrative interpretation of self-definition running AFTER the event or indeed overlaid upon the event. Hence an exclusive identity in the temporal is aligned with the attempt to predict and control what otherwise feels naked or powerless. You can only BE the event itself – which to the unprepared is feared as loss of self (life). Lest we BE STILL and KNOW. But such knowing is a transparency of what is usually taken to be self and world and cannot be meaningfully described. This IS You. Love can… Read more »
The holocaust makes people so afraid they don’t even dare to investigate. Big brother is watching.
Does it? or do you or we use it for such a purpose?
Everything can be seen in terms of the USE to which it is being put.
But phishing works on the premise that one can pass off the false in the forms associated with true or the wish or fear it be true.
Form itself is not the determiner of reality.
Regardless what something seems to be, what we use it FOR is all the meaning it holds for us.
To be awake is not to be in judgement over anything or anyone, but to know our purpose and live it.
I didn’t embezzle, and if I DID embezzle, clearly someone set me up. To embezzle. To make me look bad. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The first order of the new government should be that the Leveson Inquiry is completed and its recommendations are fully and immediately implemented.
The Guardian would be a lot more careful as would all the rest including social media.
Truth is power or in this age of psyops-a-ga-ga it’s become – powering the narrative is truth – cos, well I say so. The hyper-drive of faking the facts, as if that will freak out the noise of the so called fakers is proving a little unreliable. The quality is somewhat lacking. The Guardian’s revamp based on the graphic design of the Beano [a comic I loved] tells us loads about how the Oxbridge fifth [filth?] column and and the ruling class, miss-read the labouring class’s insight and wit and that somehow they can transplant it with cleaver paid for stooges and shills herding them with Denis the Menace antics of Putin, Baby-face Finlyson Trump and the Bash Street Kids trying to revive Old Labour from the New/old Neo Liberal brand. As for Schroedinger’s cat, well we had WMSM taken in by that with the Babchenko stunt. Which was a… Read more »
‘These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father’…’thy word is truth’ John 1/17:17
Truth – to be itself – is beyond editing, and therefore conflict. Truth is neither threatened by illusion or mocked – but our awareness of truth can be lost or rather, covered over by lies and reactions to lies. And so conflict is the denial of truth upon which a ‘self is made up’ or raised in place of true and from the belief in the attack being true. The self of any ‘war on perceived and believed evil’ is fathered by it. making it real by the very assumption it must be defended against rather than seen truly. Lies do not compete with truth – for they have none, but the co-fusing of or weaving of lies into truths, is the liability of taking ‘truth’s out of their living context. Symbols, images. concepts and stories of truth are a kind of shorthand reference that becomes a shortcircuit replacement, that… Read more »
”People already know the truth … the official truth, which is the only truth there is.” It is not the only truth there is. There is what I would call ‘popular truth’ which is not the dominant narrative, but the sort of truth you would commonly come across in the doctor’s waiting room, in the pub, waiting at the bus stop talking to ordinary people who do not buy the establishment bullshit. The mass of people who believe that politicians, bankers, solicitors, journalists are on the make, and society is a pure racket. These truths came to seep into the mass consciousness of the people precisely through their lived experience. It didn’t come through sitting in the reading room of the British Museum. So we have 3 kinds of truth here. Elite truth, Popular truth and Heretical truth. Whether the masses will do something about it is another question. But… Read more »
@Francis Lee: “we have 3 kinds of truth here. Elite truth, Popular truth and Heretical truth. ”
Fourth kind is Actual truth: The correspondence between what is claimed to have happened and what actually happened. If what is claimed to happen actually keeps on happening regardless of whether the first 3 (ie, the Elite, the Populace or the Heretics) like it or not, then Actual truth is known as Scientific truth: What Dante in Purgatorio calls Fortuna “who goes blithely about her Heavenly business with no heed to the blessings or curses of mankind”.
Indeed so, however the Actual Truth is usually suppressed by the purveyors of the Elite truth and the Heretical truth so that it gets as little exposure as possible. The Popular truth, on the other hand, tends to be a mix of Elite, Heretical and Actual truth. The real problem comes when the Elite truth, Heretical truth and Popular truth coalesces to become Actual truth when it actually isn’t true at all. Things like Manifest Destiny fall into this category and look at how much pain that alone has caused. Then we must add the unfortunate human tendency to accept what confirms our prejudices as truth and what doesn’t as lies, something few of us are immune to.
The “actual truth”, insofar as it is not one with the speaker (e.g. that person’s own thoughts), is never guaranteed accessible. Theres no rock to stand on. Period.
Yes to that, vexarb!
Just because much or even most of what is presented to us as facts about the world and its history is a ‘story’ concocted by whichever groups is or was in power in no way undermines the real existence of objective truth.
We are not forever in a Schroedinger’s cat situation where everything is uncertain and subject to more than one possible ‘correct’ answer. We do not live in an ultimately relitavistic universe – that’s just another ‘story’ which some, including this author, choose to believe.
There is no way he can prove it.
That should of course be ‘relativistic’
Prove, no. Validate, yes. Physicists have validated the superposition of particles many times. Schroedinger’s cat is dead and alive …until we measure (determine, collapse) the superposition.
https://www.nature.com/news/physicists-snatch-a-peep-into-quantum-paradox-1.13899
Pure objectivity (observer as observer) failed as a paradigm (logical empiricism, logical positivism, analytic philosophy, scientism): but a “second order” (observer as participator) science has yet to fully take its place. Systems thinking, second order cybernetics, neurophenomenology, cognitive science, cognitive lingistics, the Santiago Theory of consciousness, are all examples of second order science. A “third order” philosophy, phenomenology, and ontology is in it’s infancy.
In defence of CJ: that’s because the story is profoundly dualistic and objective …which is why it is only a story. To show that …we need to look at the claim of “tertium non datur” no third is given. That is the Latin for TINA (there is no alternative) …which is perhaps the biggest propaganda of all.
BigB, Agreed on the empirical validation of all the paradoxes which Einstein deduced from quantum theory in an effort to prove its logical absurdity — the Laser, Probabilistic momentum exchange between radiation quanta and atoms, Quantum entanglement, and his celebrated definition of madness: “A quantum scientist repeating the same experiment and expecting a different result each time”. But all Einstein’s theoretical paradoxes have now proved rock solidly reproducible _on average_. So reproducible _statistically_ that they can be reliably used in technology. Which means that they are _actually_ true. I believe there is a flutter of excitement, at the moment, in mathematico-physico circles, because the quantum theory of the distribution of electronic shells in large atoms (which is random and probabilistic ) has been found to be related to the Riemann Conjecture on the distribution of Prime Numbers (than which nothing can be imagined more orderly and deterministic). It seems to… Read more »
The empirical validation of Einstein’s disconcerting postulate (that quantal momentum exchange is a “random event”) demonstrates (contrary to Einstein’s own deepest beliefs) that God really does throw dice. But the recent discovery of a mathematical correspondence that uses Random Matrix Theory to calculate Electron Orbit Distribution (real quantal events) as well as Prime Number Distribution (theoretical deterministic order) seems to me The Justice of Zeus in Numbers. God throws dice in the real world but pure mathematics (Analytical Number Theory) suggests that His throws are fair — God’s dice are not loaded. His dice being the fundamental building blocks of bodily reality (quanta) and the fundamental building blocks of pure numbers (the primes), respectively.
I did have a real problem with Greenwald saying that the Assange/Manafort story could possibly be true and was about to write him off. If he’d used a sarcastic font, I would have wised up immediately. The Guardian lies are serious poison for those who operate within normal moral bounds.